"The following is an excerpt from Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, by Robert Jensen

King of the Hill

The object of the children's game King of the Hill is to be the one who remains on top of the hill (or, if not an actual hill, a large pile of anything or the center of a designated area). To do that, one has to repel those who challenge the king's supremacy."

Defying a decades-long push for diversity in America, Sunday mornings can be the most segregated time of the week. Mixed-race congregations are relatively rare, notes University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen.

"After an intense three hours, the workshop on pornography I have been leading is winding down. The 40 women all work at a center that serves battered women and rape survivors. These are the women on the front lines, the ones who answer the 24-hour hotline and work one-on-one with victims. They counsel women who have just been raped, help women who have been beaten, and nurture children who have been abused. These women have heard and seen it all. No matter how brutal a story might be, they have experienced or heard one even more brutal; there is no way to one-up them on stories of men’s violence. But after three hours of information, analysis, and discussion of the commercial heterosexual pornography industry, many of these women are drained. Sadness hangs over the room."

"As it becomes harder to shut out their conversation, it becomes clear that much of the talk is about sex. The alpha male of the group (who is the boyfriend of the woman) is holding forth to the two other men about how to maneuver into bed, including tips on the use of alcohol and a little bit of force when necessary."

As we were setting up for an early Last Sunday gathering, a longtime participant in local progressive politics asked me, bluntly, "What's your agenda with this?"

I offered the event's mission statement: We hoped to create a space in which people could get together to face honestly deepening economic, political, cultural, and ecological crises; existing political and religious institutions are inadequate to cope with these cascading crises; the goal was a "progressive space" that would raise issues, without channeling people into a particular movement or party. We weren't creating an organization but offering a place for networking.

When I read Steven Weinberg's assertion that those supporting a boycott of Israel suffer from a "moral blindness" that could only be explained by anti-Semitism, I wondered how he squared that claim to the moral high ground with a comment he once made to me that smacked of anti-Palestinian bigotry.

For two years I have served at the University of Texas at Austin on the faculty committee on “academic freedom and responsibility,” a pairing of concepts that is common in higher education. While there is a fairly broad consensus on what “freedom” means, competing conceptions of “responsibility” lead to two very different ideas about the appropriate role for professors in public life.

There is a close connection between who rules and who benefits. Today in the U.S the gap between rich and everyone else has reached levels not seen since the 1890s. Tax breaks and tax cuts have enabled the top 1% to corner 20% of the nation's income and more than 40% of the wealth. Those numbers make the U.S. more unequal than any other advanced industrial country. The free press calls this the free market. The "ism" in Capitalism makes some people uncomfortable so better to speak in euphemisms. The systems of power and domination are glossed over or elided altogether. "It wouldn't do," as Orwell sarcastically used to say, to be too specific. Best to keep the natives in the dark...